In article <Pine.PMDF.3.95.970712135535.557895395A-100000@UTARLG.UTA.EDU>,
Sarah Jones  <jones@UTARLG.UTA.EDU> wrote:
>On 9 Jul 1997, Bob Stahley wrote:
>
>> Joe Caldwell <yellosub@worldnet.att.net> wrote: [ ... ]
>> : shrugging of my shoulders.  I wholeheartedly agree that there is no
>> : logical reason for John to insert a "toking" sound at any juncture of
>> : "Girl", but it just doesn't sound like my definition of a "sigh".
>> : Perhaps we just "sigh" differently in the Southern US.  :^)
>> 
>> I've always heard it as if the word "Girl" was being uttered as a
>> saddened, weary epithet:  an intake of breath, almost vocallizing "ahhhh"
>> as the breath is taken in, then the explusion of the word, "girl." 
>
>I'm not sure English has a word to name the sound and its meaning in
>"Girl".  I agree "sigh" doesn't quite make it.  "Sigh" to me is as Joe
>describes above.  To me, Bob is closer, but ...  for the nearly-a-year
>I've been dropping by rmb I've been trying to verbalize this sound,
>without satisfaction.
>
>Which is getting close...  a second or two of nonverbal sound that
>incorporates what the Stones took an entire song to say in "I Can't Get No
>Satisfaction".  There's the shock-to-the-head feeling you get when you see
>someone who stirs the loins, the continuing hope that it will eventually
>come together, the resignation you feel when in more lucid moments you
>know it won't happen, and despite this the still continuing dream that it
>still just might...  all in a second of nonverbal sound we don't even have
>a word for.  what an amazing gestalt.

That's the way I hear it. "Sigh" doesn't come close, because as we've
noted, this is the inverse of a sigh. And more!

It's the sound you make when you're recalling someone from your past,
whose memory makes a wound in your heart that you can only overcome if you
take a deep breath before your next word. A *very* deep breath. 

If you don't, you might cry. Your voice might betray you and tremble the
love you're trying to hide away. Even while you're being clever and cool,
as John is in "Girl", you can still hear the raw heat of the magma inside,
the shrill pain of being left by someone with whom you'd managed to
resolve exactly nothing...and whose brand you carry on your soul despite
the distance of time and the remoteness of fantasy.

But is it so surprising that the Beatles *usually* write about love, and
not (as some misperceive) drugs or conspiracies or lyrical novelties?

Think about it for a moment. Almost all their songs explore it, one way or
another. And if you're at a loss to understand what they mean, in almost
any given circumstance, try love. 

Odd thing, that. You take four average guys from any one town, mix
them together with whatever talent they may happen to have, whatever
camaraderie, whatever stray spark of occasional genius, and rare's
the outcome that you'll get such universal eloquence about a topic
we're all supposed to understand already...but which keeps us stumbling
no matter how hard we try (or marvelling, in the best of circumstances!).

Yet we don't understand love. We don't see all its unexplained detours and
pitfalls. If we did, the music wouldn't have such power over us. This
message is like an elusive prayer, a miasmic mantra---some elemental
lesson we're all too dense to comprehend, most of the time. 

The persona John invents for "Girl" would seem too bright to fall for
false promises, yet he does, consistently, if you connect the dots in
Lennon's words and music. Or maybe John never knew this pain personally; 
maybe he was practicing for some future love he feared he'd lose. If his
expression isn't his own, it's a hell of a good imitation of what others
had faced.  That inverse sigh is all too real! And that's one of the
things that makes "Girl" an often-overlooked masterwork. 

Even in these cavalier years, our ironic nineties, we're capable of
falling down in a dead faint over the deft certainty of lyrical truth,
when it's presented to us by singers who (it was once thought) had ceased
to grant us their wisdom some twenty-seven years ago: "Thought I'd been 
in love before/But in my heart I wanted more...."

Maybe that's why poets got away with writing love ballads for so many
centuries...our memories (collective and otherwise) are too weak to
recall love's truth, without some modern balladeer to remind us.

The particular balladeers on whom we depend have never failed us. They
still don't. But how did the Beatles learn it so well? Where did they get
this insight? Who was responsible for their prescience?

Because when you look at their lives---at least their lives in the
sixties---it's hard to imagine that their personal experiences could have
added up to such a divine equation. 

They seemed to have such varieties of upbringing, of minor romantic
tempests. Surely mere biography can't explain how they knew the multihued
threads of love's complex tapestry. 

But no matter where you turn, that's what they sing, in a lyrical and
harmonic weave that's as sacred as the truths of antiquity...and sometimes
as incomprehensible as a lost language.

More than any other noun in their compositional oeuvre, the Beatles remark
on the subject of love. That's they word that occurs more often than any
other (save the odd determiner or pronoun): "Love". 

And how many permutations and intricacies! How did they know?

From the simplest:

You know I love you. You're the only love. You'll never know how much
I really love you. Only a fool would doubt our love. Imagine I'm in
love with you. Deep in love, not a lot to say. I'm in love for the
first time, don't you know it's gonna last....

To the uncertain:

You've got to hide your love away. I would hate my disappointment to
show. I'm not what I appear to be. Or should I say she once had me.
How can you laugh when you know I'm down? Love was such an easy game
to play. And she promises the earth to me and I believe her. When she
says her love is dead you think she needs you. Love has a nasty habit
of disappearing overnight....

To the hopeful:

Love you whenever we're together, love you when we're apart. Seems
that all I've really been doing, is waiting for you....

I know Beatlemania was often said to be full of hype and hyperbole, but
when you strip it back to its inner essential kernel (which is exactly
what you have to do in any proper harvest), the everyday effluvia falls
back like a bad dream, and you're left with the message most pop groups of
the nineties (let alone the sixties!) would be proud to pronounce with
such eloquence.  And it's no different now than it was thirty years ago,
or three hundred, or three thousand. 

Men and women love just the same. And the Beatles found out the heart's
most inner need, and keep repeating it to us---sometimes without
words!---lest we forget the message we've been trying to learn since our
minds first felt conscious thought, and first yearned to hear the warmth
of love articulated in sound.

If anyone desires it, that message is still fresh and sweet in their
songs.  All one needs is the faith to perceive it, and the strength to
pursue it.


-- 
"Somebody else told me this story. I wasn't
there and I sure am sorry".
--------------------------------
saki  (dlm3@midway.uchicago.edu)